The Work We Don't Count — Issue #14
A trillion dollars of work. Nobody counted it.
ONE STORY, ONE SIGNAL, ONE TOOL, ONE QUESTION - EVERY WEEK
Issue #14 - The Work We Don't Count
I’m writing this from my brother’s kitchen table. I’ve been here just over a week, and most of what I’ve done in that time will never show up on any record of my work. Visiting my mother in the hospital for three days while her doctors started a new medication. Arranging to pick up the prescription so she could stay on schedule once she got home. Sitting quietly in a chair while she slept.
I’m not telling you any of this for sympathy. I’m telling you because I’ve spent years coaching people through career decisions, and I keep finding the same thing beneath the choices that look irrational from the outside. There is a second job. Nobody counts it.
Photo by razi pouri on Unsplash
A Coaching Story
💬 A de-identified composite scenario based on my coaching experiences. This story does not reflect the experience of any particular individual or organization in any way.
A woman I coach turned down a promotion last spring. She told her boss she wasn’t ready.
That wasn’t true.
Here’s what was true: Her mother had started forgetting things. Her father had died two years ago. She was driving 90 minutes each way, twice a week, to sort pill boxes and argue with a Medicare rep. She was also raising a 12-year-old.
She was working two jobs. Only one of them had a title.
“I feel like I’m falling behind,” she said.
I asked her what she meant by that. Behind who, and by what measure? She started to answer, then stopped. She realized she was comparing herself to people who were not doing everything she was doing.
So we counted it. Actual hours, on paper. Roughly 22 hours each week of driving, calls, paperwork, and the particular exhaustion of managing someone else’s decline. When she saw the number she went quiet for a while.
She isn’t falling behind. She’s working harder than almost anyone I know. It’s just that half her work doesn’t count by any traditional measure.
That distinction was everything. Falling behind is a performance problem, and the fix for a performance problem is to try harder. Being overextended is a capacity problem, and the fix is that something comes off the plate or somebody helps carry it. She had been reaching for the first solution for two years while living inside the second problem.
She took the promotion three months later. Nothing about her mother’s situation got easier. What changed is that she stopped treating the caregiving work as a defect in her performance and started treating it as a fact of her life. Then she negotiated for what she needed to do the second job while also doing the first.
The Changing World of Work
📊 A key data point and my insights about what it means to the changing world of work around us.
In 2024, family caregivers in the United States provided 49.5 billion hours of unpaid care to adults. Valued honestly, that comes to more than $1 trillion in economic value, which is more than the country spent on Medicaid that year (AARP Public Policy Institute, Valuing the Invaluable 2026, 2026).
None of it appears in the nation’s GDP. None of it earns a pension. None of it goes on a résumé.
Roughly 59 million Americans care for an adult, and seven in 10 of them also hold a paying job (AARP & National Alliance for Caregiving, Caregiving in the US 2025, 2025). The average caregiving workload is 27 hours a week. That is a second job. It just isn’t on the org chart.
In the post-pandemic era, we took away much of the flexibility that helps with managing that second job. Two-thirds of CEOs say return-to-office mandates pushed a disproportionate number of women out of their jobs, and women are five times more likely than men to say caregiving is why they left the workforce (Forbes, RTO Mandates Force Caregivers Out Of Work, 2026).
But the data misses the bigger story. Most of these people don’t quit. They downshift. They take the job below their highest level of competence because the hours are predictable, and the spreadsheet records that as a personal choice.
This Week’s Resource
⚙️ A framework, tool, tip, AI prompt or skill that you can save and put to use immediately.
The Second-Job Audit
Here’s what I’ve seen work when someone is carrying an invisible load and calling it a personal shortcoming. Three moves, in order. The order matters.
One: count the hours. Not an estimate. For one week, write down every block of time that goes to care, coordination, or cleanup that nobody is paying you for. Driving, phone calls, forms, and the 20 minutes after a hard call when you can’t do anything useful. The number is not always easy to see, but it’s important. You cannot negotiate for something you have never measured.
Two: name the real problem. Look at the number and say which problem you actually have. If you are falling behind, it means you are underperforming, and the fix is to work harder. If you are actually overextended, it means you are at or above capacity, and the fix is to remove work or add support. Those two labels send you down completely different roads. We assume the first one almost every time, because we have been taught that care isn’t really work, so it can’t possibly be the reason we’re tired.
Three: ask for the fact, not the feeling. Don’t go into your manager’s office asking for understanding. Go in with the number and one specific structural request. My client’s version sounded like this:
“I’m managing my mother’s care, and it runs about 22 hours a week. I’m not asking to do less work. I’m asking to do it on a schedule that doesn’t collapse when she has a bad week. Two remote days and a hard stop on Thursdays would cover it.”
She got both. The public policy issues stayed exactly as broken as they were — she didn’t have to fix those. She just needed breathing room.
A Powerful Coaching Question
🤔 This week’s high-value coaching question for you to consider in whatever way you like to reflect.
What are you doing this week that no system anywhere is counting? And what would change if you described that effort out loud to one person who could help you act on it?
Inspiration for the Week
“Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity.”
— Simone Weil, letter to Joë Bousquet, 13 April 1942
Weil wrote that to a man lying in a hospital bed with a wound that never healed. She understood that paying real attention to another person costs something, and that we have never had a good way to measure that cost. You are spending that currency every week. It isn’t nothing just because nobody is counting it.
Before You Go
If you're carrying an uncounted second job right now, hit reply and tell me what it is. I read every email.
Until next week,
Sociologist wrote about this in her book The Second Shift, published in 1989. Then we thought more about child care and running the home, but taking care of elders is part of it too. And yes, it primarily falls to women.